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Ruth Howard

Students as 'Free Agent Learners' : April 2009 : THE Journal - 0 views

  • 51 percent of teachers are interested in learning how to integrate gaming into daily learning activities;
  • Sixty-five percent said it appeals to different learning styles; another 65 percent said it increases student engagement. Others said it allows for student-centered learning (47 percent), helps develop problem-solving and critical thinking skills (40 percent), helps develop creativity (39 percent), allows students to gain experience through trial and error (37 percent), and helps students visualize difficult concepts (35 percent).
  • Of those who have some interest in gaming, responses were varied as to its value in education. Sixty-five percent said it appeals to different learning styles; another 65 percent said it increases student engagement. Others said it allows for student-centered learning (47 percent), helps develop problem-solving and critical thinking skills (40 percent), helps develop creativity (39 percent), allows students to gain experience through trial and error (37 percent), and helps students visualize difficult concepts (35 percent).
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  • Of those who have some interest in gaming, responses were varied as to its value in education. Sixty-five percent said it appeals to different learning styles; another 65 percent said it increases student engagement. Others said it allows for student-centered learning (47 percent), helps develop problem-solving and critical thinking skills (40 percent), helps develop creativity (39 percent), allows students to gain experience through trial and error (37 percent), and helps students visualize difficult concepts (35 percent).
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    Students want more control over their own learning experiences through technology and want to define their own educational destinies and determine the direction of their learning. "This free agent learner is one that is technology-enabled, technology-empowered, and technology-engaged to be ... an important part of driving their own educational destiny. To some extent they feel ... it's a responsibility. They also feel it's a right to be able to do that. So technology has enabled this free agent learner. We have the opportunity in education to make sure they're on the right track and to be supportive of their learning experiences." Ive been waiting for this! This is exciting it points to the idea that students will co-create their curriculum. In my mind it will become imperitive that individuals choose their highest bliss-subjects and projects that reflect their passions. In the new collaborative work environments students will be more highly valued for their contributions to areas that they are most naturally motivated to explore. Their resulting contributions will result in inventiveness and cutting edge investigations via passion, self motivation and peer inspiration and direct access to thought leaders/mentors in the field. Teachers might become guides to ensuring students intentions are achieved- teachers as arbiters of human potential. Students will no longer be compared to each other. They will score according to their own self affirmed destinations-allowing of course for reviews and changes of destiny.Teachers might also need roles in law and ethics to ensure students are safe in their online world activities, monitoring students and their online peers, intercepting or prompting inside the conversations?
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    Of those who have some interest in gaming, responses were varied as to its value in education. Sixty-five percent said it appeals to different learning styles; another 65 percent said it increases student engagement. Others said it allows for student-centered learning (47 percent), helps develop problem-solving and critical thinking skills (40 percent), helps develop creativity (39 percent), allows students to gain experience through trial and error (37 percent), and helps students visualize difficult concepts (35 percent). But perhaps the most significant trend in education technology, Evans said, is the emergence of the student as a "free agent learner": Students want more control over their own learning experiences through technology and want to define their own educational destinies and determine the direction of their learning. "This free agent learner is one that is technology-enabled, technology-empowered, and technology-engaged to be ... an important part of driving their own educational destiny. To some extent they feel ... it's a responsibility. They also feel it's a right to be able to do that. So technology has enabled this free agent learner. We have the opportunity in education to make sure they're on the right track and to be supportive of their learning experiences."
David McGavock

CITE Journal - Editorial - 21 views

  • A classroom that has successfully integrated technology into the curriculum would be one where you would not really notice it because it would be so second nature. The teacher would not have to think up ways to use whatever tools were available, but would seamlessly use them to enhance the learning of whatever content was being covered. Technology [would be] used to assist in acquiring content knowledge, and the acquisition of technology skills [would be] secondary. Contrast this depiction with what the International Society for Technology in Education’s (ISTE) National Educational Technology Standards for Students (NETS-S; ISTE, 2002) say about technology integration: Curriculum integration with the use of technology involves the infusion of technology as a tool to enhance the learning in a content area or multidisciplinary setting….Effective integration of technology is achieved when students are able to select technology tools to help them obtain information in a timely manner, analyze and synthesize the information, and present it professionally. The technology should become an integral part of how the classroom functions—as accessible as all other classroom tools.
  • his urging to shift the focus from the learning tools to what is being learned and how that learning happens still needs to be heeded—almost 20 years later.
  • Integration is defined not by the amount or type of technology used, but by how and why it is used.
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  • many of these technology-specific studies did not explore more fundamental issues in technology and education
  • what needs to be further developed, examined, and shared
  • particular curriculum standards-based instructional strategies that are appropriately matched to students’ learning needs and preferences
  • understanding the processes and interim results of how and why specific tools can and should be appropriated
  • help students with distinct needs and preferences to achieve identified learning goals.
  • the STaR Chart
  • According to the national StaR Chart, then, technology use in what is typically described as “constructivist” learning is preferable to technology used to “reinforce basic academic skills.”
  • Constructivists view people as constructive agents and view the phenomenon of interest (meaning or knowledge) as built instead of passively “received”
  • curriculum-based integration of educational technologies – defined in Education and Technology: An Encyclopedia (Kovalchick & Dawson, 2004) as “the effective integration of technology throughout the curriculum to help students meet the standards and outcomes of each lesson, unit, or activity”
  • As discerning educators and researchers, we should question why teachers’ roles “must” change to integrate technology effectively into K-12 curricula.
  • the technologies themselves do not require this shift
  • Though teachers in the nationally representative sample they studied acknowledged that computers helped them to change instructional practice over time, they cited experience, organized professional learning, and school culture as the primary factors provoking instructional changes.
  • In districts in which teachers’ academic freedom is preserved—at least in part—aren’t the pedagogical approaches to be used the result of decisions that each teacher makes, preferably rooted in a well-informed knowledge base of both students’ learning needs and preferences and corresponding methodological alternatives?
  • Can it really be assumed that a particular approach “works best” in all teaching, learning, school, district, and community contexts?
  • perhaps a new approach is warranted at this point in time—one that genuinely respects pedagogical plurality and honors teachers’ academic freedom.
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    A classroom that has successfully integrated technology into the curriculum would be one where you would not really notice it because it would be so second nature. The teacher would not have to think up ways to use whatever tools were available, but would seamlessly use them to enhance the learning of whatever content was being covered. Technology [would be] used to assist in acquiring content knowledge, and the acquisition of technology skills [would be] secondary. Contrast this depiction with what the International Society for Technology in Education's (ISTE) National Educational Technology Standards for Students (NETS-S; ISTE, 2002) say about technology integration: Curriculum integration with the use of technology involves the infusion of technology as a tool to enhance the learning in a content area or multidisciplinary setting….Effective integration of technology is achieved when students are able to select technology tools to help them obtain information in a timely manner, analyze and synthesize the information, and present it professionally. The technology should become an integral part of how the classroom functions-as accessible as all other classroom tools.
Tero Toivanen

Digital Citizenship | the human network - 0 views

  • The change is already well underway, but this change is not being led by teachers, administrators, parents or politicians. Coming from the ground up, the true agents of change are the students within the educational system.
  • While some may be content to sit on the sidelines and wait until this cultural reorganization plays itself out, as educators you have no such luxury. Everything hits you first, and with full force. You are embedded within this change, as much so as this generation of students.
  • We make much of the difference between “digital immigrants”, such as ourselves, and “digital natives”, such as these children. These kids are entirely comfortable within the digital world, having never known anything else. We casually assume that this difference is merely a quantitative facility. In fact, the difference is almost entirely qualitative. The schema upon which their world-views are based, the literal ‘rules of their world’, are completely different.
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  • The Earth becomes a chalkboard, a spreadsheet, a presentation medium, where the thorny problems of global civilization and its discontents can be explored out in exquisite detail. In this sense, no problem, no matter how vast, no matter how global, will be seen as being beyond the reach of these children. They’ll learn this – not because of what teacher says, or what homework assignments they complete – through interaction with the technology itself.
  • We and our technological-materialist culture have fostered an environment of such tremendous novelty and variety that we have changed the equations of childhood.
  • As it turns out (and there are numerous examples to support this) a mobile handset is probably the most important tool someone can employ to improve their economic well-being. A farmer can call ahead to markets to find out which is paying the best price for his crop; the same goes for fishermen. Tradesmen can close deals without the hassle and lost time involved in travel; craftswomen can coordinate their creative resources with a few text messages. Each of these examples can be found in any Bangladeshi city or Africa village.
  • The sharing of information is an innate human behavior: since we learned to speak we’ve been talking to each other, warning each other of dangers, informing each other of opportunities, positing possibilities, and just generally reassuring each other with the sound of our voices. We’ve now extended that four-billion-fold, so that half of humanity is directly connected, one to another.
  • Everything we do, both within and outside the classroom, must be seen through this prism of sharing. Teenagers log onto video chat services such as Skype, and do their homework together, at a distance, sharing and comparing their results. Parents offer up their kindergartener’s presentations to other parents through Twitter – and those parents respond to the offer. All of this both amplifies and undermines the classroom. The classroom has not dealt with the phenomenal transformation in the connectivity of the broader culture, and is in danger of becoming obsolesced by it.
  • We already live in a time of disconnect, where the classroom has stopped reflecting the world outside its walls. The classroom is born of an industrial mode of thinking, where hierarchy and reproducibility were the order of the day. The world outside those walls is networked and highly heterogeneous. And where the classroom touches the world outside, sparks fly; the classroom can’t handle the currents generated by the culture of connectivity and sharing. This can not go on.
  • We must accept the reality of the 21st century, that, more than anything else, this is the networked era, and that this network has gifted us with new capabilities even as it presents us with new dangers. Both gifts and dangers are issues of potency; the network has made us incredibly powerful. The network is smarter, faster and more agile than the hierarchy; when the two collide – as they’re bound to, with increasing frequency – the network always wins.
  • A text message can unleash revolution, or land a teenager in jail on charges of peddling child pornography, or spark a riot on a Sydney beach; Wikipedia can drive Britannica, a quarter millennium-old reference text out of business; a outsider candidate can get himself elected president of the United States because his team masters the logic of the network. In truth, we already live in the age of digital citizenship, but so many of us don’t know the rules, and hence, are poor citizens.
  • before a child is given a computer – either at home or in school – it must be accompanied by instruction in the power of the network. A child may have a natural facility with the network without having any sense of the power of the network as an amplifier of capability. It’s that disconnect which digital citizenship must bridge.
  • Let us instead focus on how we will use technology in fifty years’ time. We can already see the shape of the future in one outstanding example – a website known as RateMyProfessors.com. Here, in a database of nine million reviews of one million teachers, lecturers and professors, students can learn which instructors bore, which grade easily, which excite the mind, and so forth. This simple site – which grew out of the power of sharing – has radically changed the balance of power on university campuses throughout the US and the UK.
  • Alongside the rise of RateMyProfessors.com, there has been an exponential increase in the amount of lecture material you can find online, whether on YouTube, or iTunes University, or any number of dedicated websites. Those lectures also have ratings, so it is already possible for a student to get to the best and most popular lectures on any subject, be it calculus or Mandarin or the medieval history of Europe.
  • As the university dissolves in the universal solvent of the network, the capacity to use the network for education increases geometrically; education will be available everywhere the network reaches. It already reaches half of humanity; in a few years it will cover three-quarters of the population of the planet. Certainly by 2060 network access will be thought of as a human right, much like food and clean water.
  • Educators will continue to collaborate, but without much of the physical infrastructure we currently associate with educational institutions. Classrooms will self-organize and disperse organically, driven by need, proximity, or interest, and the best instructors will find themselves constantly in demand. Life-long learning will no longer be a catch-phrase, but a reality for the billions of individuals all focusing on improving their effectiveness within an ever-more-competitive global market for talent.
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    Mark Pesce: Digital Citizenship and the future of Education.
Dennis OConnor

The Shadow Scholar - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 19 views

  • The Shadow Scholar The man who writes your students' papers tells his story Jonathan Barkat for The Chronicle Review Enlarge Image $().ready(function() { $('#enlarge-popup').jqm({onShow:chronShow, onHide:chronHide, trigger:'a.show-enlarge', modal: 'true'}); }); Jonathan Barkat for The Chronicle Review By Ed Dante Editor's note: Ed Dante is a pseudonym for a writer who lives on the East Coast. Through a literary agent, he approached The Chronicle wanting to tell the story of how he makes a living writing papers for a custom-essay company and to describe the extent of student cheating he has observed. In the course of editing his article, The Chronicle reviewed correspondence Dante had with clients and some of the papers he had been paid to write. In the article published here, some details of the assignment he describes have been altered to protect the identity of the student.
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    One tactic is to proactively teach the nuances of plagiarism in an engaging way. Here's a link to a series of games that help all students (k-12 & Higher Ed) understand the issues. http://www.diigo.com/list/wiredinstructor/plagiarism_games While these games won't stop the kind of abuses described in the article, they will help teachers prove they have taken the necessary steps to inform and train their students about plagiarism and plagiarism detection.
Ruth Howard

DJEEO in 5 minutes - 0 views

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    We call DJEEO an outdoors computer game for children. DJEEO combines advanced IT technology with outdoors activities in a multimedia treasure hunt/orientation run. DJEEO is designed to: Facilitate learning through physical activity and play. Strengthen cooperation and communication. Increase intensity and activity for all participants. How do you win? To win a mission a team needs to score the most points. A team scores points by solving problems and finding posts in the field. The game can only be completed through close cooperation between the agents in the field and the control center. DJEEO in Education The problems that need to be solved can be tailored to the subject being taught in class. In other words DJEEO can be used as an educational tool in almost any subject at primary school. After a session where 20 teachers participated we asked them which subjects they thought DJEEO could be used in. Their answer: “Mathematics, social studies, geography, language, physical education, etc. We then discussed DJEEO’s usefulness as an educational tool. All agreed that the ability to adjust the level of difficulty and the tailoring of questions to subject matter, allowed by the flexible project module, makes DJEEO a valuable tool for almost any subject.
Denis S

Simple, Social, and Snazzy Storytelling with Storybird - 30 views

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